‘Mindhunter’ Episode 3 Recap: Ear to Ear

The fun thing about Netflix‘s release model is that when you’re wrong about a plotpoint, you don’t have to wait a week to find out. Instant self-loathing! And oh, boy, when I wrote in the last recap of Netflix’s Mindhunter that the notes Holden Ford is taking during his Coed Killer interviews couldn’t possibly help in the case of Rosemary Gonzalez, I was more off than Ed Kemper at a pep rally. You see, Kemper is a criminal who loves to talk who has deep-seeded mother issues that turned him violent. Down in Sacramento, Ford and Bill Tench round up the man who’s been beating the elderly and knifing their dogs by…identifying the closest criminal who loves to talk who has deep-seeded mother issues that turned him violent. The system works, as they say.

“It’s kind of prosaic that it’s always the mother,” Debbie tells Ford, and she’s right, and that’s also kind of the point of Mindhunter overall. The connecting threads that link one serial killer to the other—the troubled upbringing, the sociopathy, the general dead-eyed-ness, etc—seem rote to us today, decades into the future. But it’s fascinating to watch Ford find connections that should have been obvious during a time when it was just easier to melt criminals in an electric chair than it was to talk to them.

But hey, if it seems exciting for us, quadruple that feeling for Ford himself. Jonathan Groff’s enthusiastic toddler in a Halloween FBI badge is having the time of his damn life discovering what makes a man butcher strangers and have sex with their corpses. He’s up into the wee hours the night ironing clothes, a jittery mess of excitement. “Did you smoke my pot?” Debbie asks, but he didn’t. He’s high on the possibilities of it all (and also probably some pot).

This results in an episode as darkly funny as it was disturbing. Familiar Fringe face Anna Torv arrives as Dr. Wendy Carr, a psychologist supporter of Ford and Tench’s psychotic side-project who suggests their findings could eventually turn into a book. Ford’s eyes go wide. “A book?” he says, more than a few times. He pens the word into his notepad in thick capital letters, stopping just short of drawing a heart around it. Holden Ford just really wants to write a book about “sequence killers.” If real life is a *spoiler*: He does, and it kind of changes law enforcement forever.

But how much of that boundless enthusiasm is edging too close for comfort to the childlike zeal Ed Kemper has for violence? This episode plays a lot with the idea of the researcher getting too close—mentally and emotionally—to the researchee; the “you’re not so different, you and I” of countless action films. While Holt McCallany keeps Tench’s face right on the brink of disapproval at all times, Ford can’t help but lean forward in genuine interest, scientific or not. “When you slit a person’s throat you need to cut it from ear to ear,” Kemper tells the agent, offering helpful hand motions. “That’s how I learned the term ‘ear to ear.’ People think it’s just an expression. It’s not, it’s an instruction.”

The look on Holden’s face is uncannily akin to a student, eager to learn, jotting down notes in class.

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Of course, Tench presents the idea of Ford as master manipulator. After a perversely chuckle-worthy pizza party, where Kemper casually describes mutilation and body disposal over a couple slices, Tench tells his partner, “He thinks you’re his friend. Which makes you a pretty great FBI agent.”

But how much of that is a true statement, and how much is Tench missing the blurring lines between Ford’s personal and professional lives. In fairness, Tench was not present for the bathroom conversation between Debbie and Ford, when the former held a nail file—playfully, of course, a kinky couples thing—to the latter’s neck. “I could impale you with this,” she says. “Then I could be part of your case study.”

“You’d be a very compelling interviewee,” he replies.

There’s an odd sense of longing to that answer, like Ford would be more analytically interested in getting stabbed in the neck right there in the bathroom than he would be upset. It’s the most I’ve felt like this coupling of characters is more than fluff. I’m definitely not saying either is going to transform into a serial killer; Mindhunter is simply not that kind of twisty whodunit. But it is, itself, a case study. Ford and Debbie are intriguing outliers that demonstrate the average person is capable of, if not Kemper levels of fucked-ness, than a tendency to display hints of the median level fucked-ness within us all.

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Case in point: Those cold opens that kicked off the last two episodes, showing a mustachioed man who is a stickler for rules but otherwise is simply going about his day. I won’t spoil anything for those taking this show slow. But these unsettling little sidenotes are a great visualization of the fact that serial killers don’t usually come in a Andre the Giant-ass package like Ed Kemper. You’re not always going to be immediately scared of the man secretly planning to chop you to pieces in his basement, which is the scariest point Mindhunter has to make so far.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.